Ted Leinhart
speaker
251 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Ted Leinhart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
and mr creel told me in the most urbane and charming english that the so-called insurrection was confined to a few los angeles socialists and some local banditti who had neither property position nor the wherewithal to command respect at lunch that day the young american opposite me cheerfully informed me
that all you needed was a hundred men to march up the paseo de la reforma and take chapotepec as the same young man went on to tell wholly ridiculous things about the border insurrectos whom i happened to know something about
i was inclined to minimize the importance of his other observations and it might have been suggested to mr creel that if the revolutionists were rich powerful and cultured gentlemen like himself they might not be so interested in rebelling nevertheless this seems an appropriate moment for the statement of a few general facts which can scarcely have been made clearer to newspaper readers at home
by the disjointed rumors of a skirmish here a bridge burned there and which may possibly be lost sight of in the new centers of interest which seem now about to be gathering there is a genuine revolution eliminating the border socialists who however altruistic their propaganda would be insurrecting to-day against taft just as much as against diaz
if the chances of success were anything like the same setting them aside and with them the soldiers of fortune and roustabouts who flock to any such disturbance as this and from these two sources has come much of the newspaper copy
printed in the States.
Ignoring the various outside influences which have been whispered about, and even Madero himself, there remains a very real and profound condition of unrest.
Little of this has expressed itself in armed revolt.
It is a state of mind, general, increasing, and inevitable.
It is not aimed directly against President Diaz.
nothing can hide or destroy the fact that diaz is one of the great men of his time one of the world's great executives there has been to be sure a perceptible change of feeling lately even toward him but it is irritation at what seems to be the stubbornness of old age rather than any active hate for him whom people speak of with almost a sort of filial affection as the old man the feeling against diaz's cabinet counsel
the dissatisfaction is with the men around him the inevitable rottenness which has gathered during the nearly thirty-five years of his benevolent despotism it is for example against the so-called scientificos a group of rich able powerful men some of them cabinet ministers whose science is believed to consist in the skill with which they have combined government with private graft and it is against the more personal tyranny
the caciquism of the state governors and hefipoliticos it must be remembered of course that mexico has been governed for the past thirty-five years with an iron hand nominally a democracy with a constitution much like ours she really has been ruled by one man who differed from other dictators less in the machinery he used
than in the fact that he was genuinely able and personally honest these governors and hefipoliticos might be loosely compared to our own state governors and city mayors with a difference that although theoretically elected they are practically appointed by the president
and they exert each within his own sphere a power we should regard as almost oriental in its ruthlessness and lack of responsibility to any one except a man higher up an american can visualize conditions somewhat remembering of course all the initial differences by imagining president grant for instance still in the white house diaz became provisional president in eighteen seventy six
and estates arbitrarily governed by his personal friends who had come in with him and remained in power ever since however unfitted by creeping tyranny and advancing decrepitude local dissatisfaction has been increased by the fact that governors are not infrequently taken from one state and placed over a part of the country with which they are quite unfamiliar and perhaps out of sympathy
one need not go into specific details to make clear the result men will be men as the lady said in one of mr augustus thomas's plays especially white men in a tropical country if there are graft and favoritism in the united states with frequent changes of administration a vigilant press and a keen public sentiment hanging over the office holder's head
it does not require any very profound penetration to surmise what might happen during a continuous regime of nearly thirty-five years in a country saturated with the traditions of the spanish conquest arbitrary arrests and punishments extravagance unnecessary public works and even the more personal immoralities of which the central american dictators have been accused are all laid at the doors of these petty chiefs
yet the american will mistake the situation if he fancies that the whole system is going to be changed by any revolution or indeed that the far-seeing want it suddenly changed i talked with one man a humanitarian and sociologist who frankly disbelieves in much of mexico's development and he spoke with considerable plausibility of the exploitation of a half awakened pastoral people
for the benefit of foreign bondholders he would have everybody vote professional politicians might gobble up the power yet he believed that it was better for the peon to have a vote to sell so to speak than not to have it at all and i talked with another on quite the opposite side who thought one free and fair election might be a good thing to clear the air and as he put it show them how impossible it was
Showing 21–40 of 251 · page 2 of 13
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